This is the second phase of our online newsmagazine Internationalopinion.com that started in 2001 and ran for more than a dozen years in its first phase. Of course, we were subjected to terrible hacking and saw hundreds of our articles and other material disappear. Undeterred, we regrouped and continued on our journey with our
older daughterSujata resolutely and regularly handling the website and putting things with renewed energy.

The last five years is a different story, a story of moves, a story of sadness. My wife Sadhana was sick, became sicker, had surgery and passed away this year, May 15, 2016.

That was and is a big change in my world, our world. Married on October 8, 1961 we were together for 54 years, seven months and one week. It was a fairy-tale love story, regarded a role model by many; and for me, the ultimate bliss.

[Our daughter Sujata was also married on October 8. Granddaughter Tamanna was also planning for the same date but other wedding essentials were not available on that day. ]

International Opinion had slowed down as Sadhana slowed down. Later the site became silent. We had meanwhile moved from Fremont to our daughter’s home in San Leandro (both in Northern California). Then moved to Houston (Katy), Texas, to be near our younger daughter Seema who had twin girls in 2007. We were in Texas for five years and Seema and her
cardiologist husband Dr. Randeep Suneja took care of us.

After a couple years Sadhana became sick and sicker. Best of hospitals could not do much. Sujata and her daughter Tamanna Roashan kept visiting us. Sujata spent more time in 2012 with her mom than at her work in Northern California. Surgery of left foot further complicated matters and Sadhana seemed to have given up. We did not and kept fighting. She was in and out of a dozen hospitals and
nursing homes in just one year.

That was indeed terribly frightening – and totally devastating.

We had to move back to San Leandro to be with Sujata and her husband Mujtaba who devoted themselves, totally, to care for Sadhana – and me. She was in a
nursing home where we celebrated her 75th birthday on October 14, 2015. Seema flew from Houston to be with us for the event.

Meanwhile International Opinion continued to be silent and Sadhana continued to be sick, in and out of hospitals and
nursing homes every three or four months. On Tamanna’s insistence, we moved from San Leandro to Los Angeles area in Southern California where she had moved a year back to pursue her career as a celebrity make-up artist.

We are a very loving and close-knit family and Sujata decided to leave her very satisfying job at
Kaiser PermanenteHospital and we four moved with a sick Sadhana to be as near Tamanna as possible. We are just six minutes away from her.

It was in January this year. However, things did not improve and Sadhana’s visits to hospital became monthly till the fateful day, May 15, when she passed away. Our care and prayers couldn’t do anything; the doctors also could do nothing though they tried their best. It was an unexpected and quick end in just 18 days from 27th April when we were asked to take her immediately to the Emergency Department.

We never expected this sudden development.

Sadhana never recovered, never came home.

This became an extremely sad chapter in our lives and continues to remain so. It has created a big void in our lives and so our child, International Opinion, seemed doomed forever though for years we had been keeping the website alive with regular payments.

I never thought the website would come alive one day, but it had to happen.

The
silver lining was shown by Tamanna’s announcement of her pregnancy and her total belief that her Nani (grandma) is coming back to her. That started changing the scenario. Though we still miss our multi-talented Sadhana badly, we
slowly started to feel that “the show must go on.”

A little bit about Sadhana:

Painting, writing poetry and articles, radio talks/programs, sewing, knitting, embroidery,
crochet, sports, singing, cooking,
hospitality and many more skills have been the hallmark of Sadhana’s glorious life. Many of her poems and articles were printed in newspapers and magazines and broadcast on radio. Her paintings and sketches have been exhibited at several places in India and abroad. Many of her paintings found special places
in homes and offices of
dignitaries, both Indian and foreign. She has beautifully painted and sketched many historic and other memorable places during her travels. Sadhana collected, edited and produced a book of poems about the war of
liberation of Bangladesh in 1971- also contributed one of her poems.

A collection of her poems will be published shortly to remind us of her talent, sensitivity,
compassion, love and her humanity.

And the new phase of Internationalopinion.com is the result of those feelings and strength, that resolve and inspiration we used to get from Sadhana. Sujata, once again, did all the hard work and plunged wholeheartedly for this re-birth. Mujtaba joined in with his computer expertise at the critical moments.

And so, here is the newly revived, second phase of IO, dedicated to the memory of Sadhana Bhatnagar.

We are sure, she would have liked us to quickly revive IO and to see me again devote my time and energy to do what I have been passionately and lovingly doing all my life.

The main plaintiff in the Hawaii case blocking President Trump’s revised temporary travel ban is an Imam with ties to the Muslim Brotherhood.

The irony is hard to miss: Trump has talked about declaring the Muslim Brotherhood a terrorist organization, and now it is a Brotherhood-backed imam who is playing a key role in blocking his executive order on immigration.

Imam Ismail Elshikh, 39, leads the largest mosque in Hawaii and claims he is suffering “irreparable harm” from the president’s executive order, which places a 90-day ban on travel to the U.S. from six countries.

One of those six countries is Syria. Elshikh’s mother- in- law is Syrian and would not be able to visit her family in Hawaii for 90 days if Trump’s ban were allowed to go into effect.

Hawaii’s Obama-appointed federal judge, Derrick Watson, made sure the ban did not go into effect, striking it down March 15, while buying Hawaii’s claim that it amounts to a “Muslim ban.” The state’s attorney general, along with co-plaintiff Elshikh, claims the ban would irreparably harm the state’s tourism industry and its Muslim families.

According to the lawsuit:

“Plaintiffs allege that the Executive Order subjects portions of the State’s population, including Dr. Elshikh and his family, to discrimination in violation of both the Constitution and the INA, denying them their right, among other things, to associate with family members overseas on the basis of their religion and national origin. The State purports that the Executive Order has injured its institutions, economy, and sovereign interest in maintaining the separation between church and state.”

The vast majority of Hawaii’s roughly 5,000 Muslims attend Elshikh’s mosque, the Muslim Association of Hawaii, which is located in a residential area of Manoa, Honolulu. The mosque, despite its ties to what many believe is an extremist and subversive organization, the Muslim Brotherhood, may now hold the key to whether the Trump travel ban passes muster in the federal court system.

Elshikh was born and raised in Cairo, Egypt, the home base of the Muslim Brotherhood, whose stated goal is to spread Sharia law throughout the world.

Elshikh is living in the U.S. on a green card, which gives him permanent legal status.

The proof that his mosque is affiliated with the Brotherhood is found in the court records for Honolulu County, which lists the deed holder as the North American Islamic Trust.

John Guandolo, a former FBI counter-terrorism specialist and now private consultant to law enforcement at Understanding the Threat, said all mosques under the “Muslim Association of” moniker are typically affiliated with the Brotherhood.

But the clincher in this case is that the mosque property is traced to NAIT, “confirming it is a Muslim Brotherhood organization,” Guandolo told WND in an email.

The Trump administration has said it is considering banning the Muslim Brotherhood in the U.S. by including it on the State Department’s list of foreign terrorist organizations.

NAIT is one of more than 200 unindicted co-conspirators named in the Holy Land Foundation terrorism-financing trial of 2007-08 in Dallas, Texas. The organization has direct ties to the Muslim Brotherhood, as documented by the FBI in evidence presented at the trial. (Sec. VII, Page 8 of court document.)

NAIT is a financial subsidiary of the Islamic Society of North America and holds the deed to more than 325 mosques in 42 U.S. states that are controlled by the Muslim Brotherhood, according to Discover the Networks.

“Because NAIT controls the purse strings of these many properties, it can exercise ultimate authority over what they teach and what activities they conduct. Specifically, the Trust seeks to ensure that the institutions under its financial influence promote the principles of Sharia law and Wahhabism,” according to Discover the Networks.

The Muslim Brotherhood was founded in 1928 in Cairo, Egypt, by Hassan al-Banna. It has been banned by Egypt’s current regime, as well as in Saudi Arabia, Russia and the United Arab Emirates.

A bill in Congress, the Muslim Brotherhood Terrorist Designation Act of 2015-16, has been languishing in committee since November 2015. House Speaker Paul Ryan has not advanced the bill or done anything to promote it.

Several members of the Trump administration have said they favor declaring the Brotherhood a terrorism organization, but so far that has not happened. One high-level Trump adviser, Mike Flynn, said he was in favor of banning the Brotherhood before he was forced to resign for misleading Vice President Mike Pence and other top White House officials about his conversations with the Russian ambassador to the United States ( during the election campaign).

Trump’s secretary of state, Rex Tillerson, described the Brotherhood as “an agent of radical Islam” during his Senate confirmation hearing.

Former U.N. Ambassador John Bolton told Breitbart News last month that the U.S. should declare the Brotherhood a terrorist organization.

“The fact is, the Brotherhood is a front for terrorism,” he said. “A number of Arab majority-Muslim countries, like Egypt and Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, have already designated it as a terrorist organization. I’ve had Muslim leaders from the Middle East say to me, ‘Are you people blind to what’s going on right in front of you and the role that the Brotherhood performs, really on an international basis?’”

But instead of banning the Brotherhood, the U.S. is letting a Brotherhood-backed imam dictate U.S. refugee and visa policy, Guandolo said.

Judge Watson, who was a Harvard law classmate of Barack Obama, issued an injunction halting Trump’s executive order from going into effect, agreeing with Hawaii’s claim that the temporary ban, 90 days on visa travelers and 120 days for refugees, would irreparably harm the state’s tourism industry and its Muslim families. (Judge Watson was appointed by Barack Obama. Also it’s reported that Obama had flown to Hawaii just two days before the Judge imposed the ban on Trump’s order.)

As for refugees, Hawaii takes very few. Of the 49 states participating in the federal refugee resettlement program, only Mississippi has taken in fewer refugees than Hawaii since 2002. Only 127 refugees have been sent to Hawaii since 2002, and nearly zero have been Muslims from the six nations on Trump’s list. The vast majority sent to Hawaii have been from Burma and Vietnam.

The six nations on Trump’s list for a 90-day moratorium on visas and a 120-day pause on refugee resettlement are Iran, Libya, Syria, Yemen, Sudan and Somalia.

Of the 127 refugees Hawaii has taken since the State Department started keeping online records in 2002, only one refugee has been from a country on Trump’s list, Iran, according to the State Department’s Refugee Processing Center database.

“There was one refugee from Iran who went to Hawaii and that probably was a Christian. That the majority of what we are taking from Iran are Christians,” said Ann Corcoran, editor of Refugee Resettlement Watch, which has been tracking resettlements in the U.S. for the past 10 years. “The biggest group were from Burma and Vietnam, and there were none from Africa, so what we have in Hawaii are a bunch of hypocrites whining about ‘irreparable harm’ from pausing refugee resettlement when, in fact, they take hardly any refugees and almost no Muslim refugees.”